Free public education and yet here we are.

Think about it. Free public education for more than a century and a half has brought us to this point.
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The Twitter-in-Chief,
‘Top Gear,’
climate change denial,
Erich von Dänikan,
Faux News,
the NRA hegemony,
all those No voters, and
the demographic that watches Channel 7Mate.
Are these the fruits of all the time, money, effort, intelligence, good will, and energy put into free public education for 150 years? Now that is a depressing thought.
All those stalwarts who championed free public education did so in the belief that it would lead to an informed, intelligent, rational, patient, and capable citizenry and all those teachers who have laboured to realise that vision, all of that and yet….
Who is going to explain these results to the shades of Harriet Martineau and Horace Mann?
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Eric Blair, we need you now more than ever. One of Blair’s biographers, Bernard Crick, says Blair was partly moved to write ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ because he feared that free public education would not prevent the society he portrayed in the novel.